Songs for The Witching Season

By JAY COCKS

The Tunnel of Love appears in stores this week, but anyone with a radio has already heard Bruce Springsteen telling what it is about. The first single from the album, Brilliant Disguise, floats easily in the air to a snapback, mid-tempo rhythm. It is like a silk scarf shading a lamp: the song throws off odd refractions of color and veils a 100-watt glow. The melody is sinuous, but the lyrics say something scary just at the end: "God have mercy on the man/ Who doubts what he's sure of." That is Tunnel of Love in two deft lines, an album about love that is not about exaltation or passion but about the doubt and fear, longing and uncertainty that shadow every deep feeling, every tender gesture.

The title track of Springsteen's 1984 album, Born in the U.S.A., sounded like a marching song, but the rhythm thrust home a sawtooth short story filled with despair and defiance. The new LP is a little more straightforward and a lot more spare. Springsteen's E Street Band reveled on Born in the U.S.A. Here they hang back; indeed, on four songs the Boss handles the instrumentation by himself. Born in the U.S.A. was an album full of bright light and bold colors and deliberate, surreptitious contradictions. Tunnel of Love, by contrast, seems washed in autumn moonlight, pale and chill. These are twelve songs for the season of the witch.

The album has a solid contemporary sheen, but it is never polished. It is as if Springsteen had buffed up a brand-new car with a sandpaper chamois. Using only simple instrumentation, with an occasional synthesizer riff or guitar blitz, Springsteen has created a modern surrogate for the resonant mystery on old blues and early rock records. This makes Tunnel of Love close kin to his 1982 solo effort, Nebraska, which was meant to sound homemade. Tunnel of Love takes that approach even further, into the mythic heart of American music and some slat-roof recording studio -- maybe on a prairie, maybe near a delta -- where a singer sits down, lays down a few sides, then % vanishes into the long night. Tunnel of Love has that kind of righteous power. It is a record that Springsteen has staked a lot on. It follows no formulas and does not provide what fans may first expect. But right now, anyhow, it sounds like the best record he has made.

Each song has an echo or a refraction in another. A willow tree in Two Faces turns up, in a more ominous context, in Brilliant Disguise. What Springsteen twice refers to as "God's light" shines, with different luster, in Cautious Man and Valentine's Day. The singer-narrator of Walk Like a Man (the album's standout cut) could easily be looking at himself, a few years later, in One Step Up and noticing "I don't see/ The man I wanted to be." There is, in fact, much lyrical speculation on manhood in this record, as if Springsteen, disgusted with the rock-Rambo hype that surrounded him during the Born in the U.S.A. concert tour, decided to right the balance. These men are racked and struggling, and if one of them sings he's "tougher than the rest," from a song of the same name, he sounds like he's faking it. No rebels here. This album is populated by people down the street who are trying their damnedest just not to be victims.

All the settings are recognizable too (weddings, dances, late-night bars and lonely roads), but Springsteen tilts them so that familiar territory can suddenly seem like a forbidding landscape. Love hurts, love haunts, love heals in these songs. The title cut suggests an amusement-park romp but ends with the kind of lyric reflection that is perfectly plainspoken and impossible to shake: "The house is haunted and the ride gets rough/ And you've got to learn to live with what you can't rise above/ If you want to ride on down in through this tunnel of love." Raymond Carver, take a turn around the floor with Chuck Berry.

The particular strength of this album, though, is that its large cast of characters -- from the wronged women to the wrung-out Saturday-night cowboys; from the rich men to hardworking Bill Horton of Cautious Man, who has the words LOVE and FEAR tattooed, Night of the Hunter-style, on his hands -- can learn to live with because Springsteen can center the dignity in all their lives. It's his name on the album and on the writing credits, but now he seems to be singing their songs.